Friday, July 17, 2009

Cellular Network City






This is our course research at the Architectural Association Design Research Lab, designed by Junkai Jian, Jinqi Huang and Lina Ahmad. The site is located in the 2010 Shanghai Expo, China. We focus on different stage of the site, "2010 Expo", "Post Expo" and also " Post Post Expo". ellular Network City proposed to redefine 'urbanism' as a series of cellular space subdivisions and transitions. Like all the ancient and historical cities that emerged from teir own spatial ordered qualities, and geometrical distributive hierarchies. We proposes a networked urbanism configured from cellular volumes, initially starting as a thick multiplicitous urban ground strata for the World's Fair Expo 2010.The landscape is interconnected with interior and exterior public spaces as well as cultural facilities and domestic spaces. Networking lines act as infrastructural connections between the distributed spatial pockets. Cellular organizations morphs from conventional aggregate spaces to exterme transformed ones, graduallu transforming into an open space.Extreme moments of transformations act as experimental pavilions that transform into radical landscapes and public spaces, and therefore enduring the legacy of the expo, whereas pricate spaces maintain their conventional appearance and homogenous transformation. On both urban, building scale and material level, the cellular network organization acts as grounds trata and spatial pockets organization, as well as porous occupable sections, all seeking a coherent yet different oriented urban order, that spans acroos the two river banks into the two sides of the city, and thus over time influencing its formation. It is an order that has the capacity to organize diferential interactivity, sectional movements, as well as diversity of scales, densities, heights, and programmatic mixities. The Expo 2010 landscape will start to be generated across both sides of the river banks, and the networked system of spatial cellular organizations and connections is proposed to extend and intensify across the site in the period intervals that follows, producing highly dense sliver organizations providing a horizontal view to the few emerged vertical organizations.Parametric Design System: A scripted 3d networking system of line segments in deployed at the site scale, coded with specific rules of growth and expansion configured from straight line segments, to provide gradual spatial transitions and subdivisions. Specific behaviors are assigned to transitional arrays of curved surface module and created within the guidelines of a bounding network, and thus transforming the conventional cube into curved surface modules, which is futher applies at different scales expressing interaction and achieving forms of notational complexity that result from simple local order and behavior.